Which one?
Google Wave? Google Buzz? Google Talk? Google Hangouts? Google Allo? Google Duo? Google Meet? Google chat that came with Google Apps? Or G Suite? Or Google Workspace?
It's also interesting to note that most of those backwards compatibility breaks in developer APIs in the Microsoft product mentioned have occurred as Microsoft has adapted to changes in (security) standards over the years, from entirely proprietary system, through custom extensions of WS-* and SAML standards, to today's OpenID Connect-based system. It's a very stark contrast to Google's messaging apps which started with the (XMPP) standards-based Google Chat and each subsequent product has been more proprietary, more of a walled garden, and less interoperable with other products.
1. MSN Messenger (+ rebrands)
2. Skype
3. NetMeeting
4. Lync (+ rebrands)
5. Yammer
6. Kaizala
7. Teams
8. SharedView
9. Windows Meeting Space
10. Groove
11. Qik
I tried to err on the side of assuming that any time they killed one product and immediately replaced it with another, it was a rebrand. (E.g. were Office Communicator / Office Live Meeting / Lync / Skype for Business actually compatible? If not, they clearly weren't just rebrands.)
Overall this seems like a very similar amount of churn, product overlap, and politics-driven product management.
Yammer is a social network and if Yammer counts for Microsoft as a "chat app" then Google gets to add Buzz, Reader, Orkut, G+, Wave, etc to the list.
Groove wasn't exactly a chat app either. It was more the P2P bastard child of Lotus Notes (or a P2P relative of SharePoint, sort of, in Microsoft terms). Chat was a feature, but it wasn't the emphasis of the app, the emphasis was more on shared workspaces (folders, documents). Some ideas that have resurfaced elsewhere in O365 and even Teams, though not in the P2P way without big cloud internet services that Groove attempted.
Windows Meeting Space was the last rebrand of NetMeeting, apparently. There's also evidence according to Wikipedia that SharedView piggy backed on the Windows Meeting Space codebase and in some ways was a "trial version" of Windows Meeting Space with different internet services backing it and paid for by ads.
Kaizala is in the process of merging into Teams, and the Lync line (last Skype for Business) is considered to have already merged/migrated. (Except for support of on premises installs which still has a few more years on the clock. Another contrast to Google who has never supported on premises installs, much less for years after the projects died/moved on.)
Qik was a Skype off-shoot/relative.
The list of supposed Google chat apps up the thread did in fact include both Buzz and Wave, so I'm just applying the same criteria. Hangouts was the chat part of G+, so I think it'd be double counting to include G+.
> Groove wasn't exactly a chat app either
Neither are Duo and Meet, which were in the list of supposed Google chat apps.
> Kaizala is in the process of merging into Teams, and the Lync line (last Skype for Business) is considered to have already merged/migrated
I don't understand. The entire thing we're supposed to be mocking Google for here is that they launch chat apps, and then force users to migrate away. Now you're saying that all these Microsoft ones don't count, because they've either already killed them and forced a migration, or are already in the process of doing so.
> Skype, Qik, Yammer, and Groove were all acquisitions. (None of Google's messenger churn has the excuse of being an acquisition.)
Fair enough that this is different. But first, note that when Google discontinues a product they got from an acquisition, HN does not consider that to be an exenuating circumstance. I think it's fair to apply the same policy here. And second, nobody forced Microsoft to buy Skype when they already had a popular app doing just the same thing, which they then killed to make room for Skype.
> Neither are Duo and Meet, which were in the list of supposed Google chat apps.
Duo and Meet were video chat apps, which seems to be a part of "chat apps". You did include video chat apps/meeting/conference apps in the Microsoft list.
Groove is more like P2P Google Docs is maybe the closest Google analog. You wouldn't include Google Docs as a chat app would you? (Although I do know some folks that use it as such.)
>> Kaizala is in the process of merging into Teams, and the Lync line (last Skype for Business) is considered to have already merged/migrated
> I don't understand. The entire thing we're supposed to be mocking Google for here is that they launch chat apps, and then force users to migrate away. Now you're saying that all these Microsoft ones don't count, because they've either already killed them and forced a migration, or are already in the process of doing so.
I wasn't saying that they don't count, I was simply furthering the conversation on exactly that sort of semantic question, and relatedly also this one:
> Hangouts was the chat part of G+, so I think it'd be double counting to include G+.
While the clients are nothing alike and there's a backcompat break in the servers, Lync/S4B provided the foundations for the tech that became Teams' voice and video chat. Does that make Lync the "chat part" of Teams? (Hangouts was also a briefly separate "product" before G+ and then again briefly after.)
Kaizala I don't know anything about directly, but what I was reading suggested that it has a ton of features, especially for bandwidth limited networks, that have never been a part of Teams before whenever the merger is supposed to happen and those features are added to Teams. When those features merge, does that make Kaizala a part of Teams? Supposedly (according to sources cited by Wikipedia) Microsoft has even been considering a "powered by Kaizala" sub-branding on those features, for the target users. If there is a "Kaizala part" of Teams, is that double counting?
> And second, nobody forced Microsoft to buy Skype when they already had a popular app doing just the same thing, which they then killed to make room for Skype.
Windows Live Messenger and Skype lived side-by-side for several years and Microsoft at the time was criticized by confusingly marketing both and keeping both alive. From what I saw as an outside observer, WLM died by its own hand and a death of a thousand papercuts. Skype, too, seems to be on the long path of killing itself with self-inflicted papercuts. I do admit both of those sad tales seem politically similar to what we observe of Google's chat efforts. That's two products I definitely feel are comparable to all that.
I have two G Suite domains and I'm utterly and absolutely confused.
- in one domain I have "Chat" just under "Important" messages. But somehow I cannot send any chats. I see only chats from 2018 or so (when they shutdown Gmail Chat). The cool thing is that they look like read email messages. But I cannot send any chat.
- in other domain I have "Hangouts" but no Chat.
I hope this real world example illustrates why parent comment is correct when asking "Which one?".
Messages sent in Google Hangouts on my own domain today show up in my email under the "Chats" label, so this functionality is still working -- if you use the right/latest app, I guess.
If Chat is built in, I don't see it yet.
I can understand Facebook or WeChat building everything into the same app, making the app into an inner platform within the platform, but when Google already control the outer platform it doesn't make much sense.
We pay for gsuite and we pay for slack. google chat is no where yet.
...Yeah, I'm not expecting that to happen en masse either, honestly, as long as we live in capitalism.
And now the big fish has spent a massive amount on a worthless product.
Kinda like MySpace.
Switching from one dominant service for posting your meal photos to another dominant service for posting your meal photos is relatively easy. But if a web tool you depend on decides to finish their "incredible journey", you're likely to remain without an equivalent replacement (VC subsidies making it easy for few players to suck out oxygen from a market segment), and you end up having to adapt your workflow to whatever remains or comes after.
Apple and Sweden have about the same valuation right now. Apple is worth 30% more than Saudi Arabia.
Sweden doesn't have valuation, so you can't compare them.
Apple has valuation which is measured in dollars. Sweden has GDP which is measured in dollars per year. The units are different, so the numbers aren't comparable.
I guess one can say "Sweden produces about one Apple's worth in a year", or "Saudi Arabia produces about one Apple's worth in a year and a bit". This however makes owning Sweden/Saudi Arabia look better than owning Apple by a shot.
Of course. I was referring to Sweden's national wealth[1], which is roughly equal to Apple's market cap of $2T. Sweden's GDP of $560B is only roughly twice Apple's FY2020 revenue of $275B.
Apple is worth roughly 2% of the national wealth of the United States, which is $106T.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_wea...
For the little sense that comparing a public company to a nation state makes, one still might be inclined to compare Apples to apples (and not to Oranges).
In this case, one should compare National Wealth (country's assets minus its liabilities) against Apple's assets minus its liabilities. That calculation gives us about 65B dollars, which puts Apple somewhere between Ghana (95th) and Turkmenistan (96th).
That advice seems laughable now, even if you hold for years. Companies are going public while nowhere near profitability. And others are experiencing surging prices on the basis of hype and rosy promises about the future. You can say "that's just tech companies", but it's not 1999 anymore. 'Tech' is not a new and mysterious industry with made-up metrics, they make up the largest companies in our economy.
The time to invest in an IPO stock is before it goes public, not after. IPOs are priced to extract the maximum possible capital, partly why the prices usually dive within the first trading day. Buying on the secondary market (NYSE/NASDAQ)is putting money in the pockets of the investment bank that underwrote the issue.
Of course once a company has been public for a while and there is sufficient public information about their performance, you can choose to go the value investing path.
Apple is also growing faster than Sweden’s economy.
I always thought the lack of adoption in this feature set was a marketing failure of Slack, but I'm now seeing it as bait for a Salesforce integration.
- Slack wasn't going to survive as an independent. Their anti-trust efforts against Microsoft + Teams seemed to go nowhere.
- Salesforce is one of the only companies that can go to-to-toe with Microsoft in the enterprise - 80%+ of the Fortune 500, 150k+ customers, 200k+ people at their conference each year
- Salesforce already know your org chart so can roll out slack to anyone already on force.com easily.
- Salesforce are building out from a data-up direction to take up what employees have open on their screens at work. Slack/collab was a big part they were missing (so is video/conf - zoom would be perfect but it's overvalued, Workday also fits)
- Integrations with CRM, customer support, social media management, etc. are a no-brainer into slack
- Microsoft are weak exactly where Salesforce are strong so a lot of customers are across both and would be tempted by free Slack over free Teams
- They're issuing stock for half the acquisition and have a cap of 250B+ which is a bit bubbly but they're doing well P&L wise recently
> everyone has Teams for free
Prevalent sentiment at my workplace: Teams integrates well for outlook meetings, but it‘s a CPU hog, has crappy chat UI.
It paralyzes work to the extent, that I only prefer to use Slack. Or zoom for bigger video calls.
- Zoom for large team meeting
- Slack for collaboration between our teams
- Skype for upper management meetings who are still only know Skype
- Teams is free with office subscription and our company has been pushing everyone to use it instead of using slack but everyone hates Teams. Terrible UI and slow
I've been using slack/mattermost/discord And functionality wise only discord can be onpar with teams.
Also it's really slow.
I have weekly Beaver meetings with my daughter using google chat and _every time_ nearly all the feeds are frozen.
Whereas my wife uses Zoom all day to talk to patients, with nary a hitch.
Google chat video is the worst I've ever used.
It's a team chat, included into Google Workspace (G Suite). It's not terrible, and not great. It runs in the browser and integrates with Gmail; is really slow; has 1-to-1 messages, groups, and rooms; rooms have threads to organize conversations, but you can't see a list, you just end up scrolling a lot.
I'm sure it'll die off soon, like everything that Google attempts that doesn't have a stellar launch and rapid growth rate.
A company that uses G Suite certainly isn't going to use MS, and usually won't choose to pay separately for Slack.
In what sense therefore could it possibly not be a real competitor? It's there, it works, it's fine. It's also relatively young and so we can expect it to improve significantly over the coming years, similar to how Meet has been improving over the past few years.
Is that really true? I'm biased since I'm on the dev side, but everyone I know is using macbook pros, with very rare stragglers using windows or linux, and they use web clients for most stuff (e.g. gsuite, etc) rather than thick clients. I suspect with the push to working from home this will only accelerate.
This is a shame, since I like Microsoft Office products and am one of the few people I know who thinks VB is a great productivity tool, .Net is superior (in terms of language design) to Java, and Excel, Visio are better than anything else out there. But it's been almost a decade since anyone I know has needed to use that stuff in the office.
Teams comes free with the suite. My company moved from webex + adhoc solutions to teams and it has worked well, at least for video chat.
MS office apps have decent support for Apple these days
You can integrate this into the SF platform and your get a good defense against other players (MSFT, SAP, Oracle).
If I can schedule a customer call and register it inside salesforce it would be great. Today I have to enter all manually on their interface :-(
Google Chat? What’s that?
I’ll stick with Slack.
It's not as pretty/lovable as Slack, but it has an additional level of organization (each team gets their own set of channels), you can add tabs of related apps/sites to each channel, etc. As far as I could tell having used both simultaneously for a few years, Teams is a complete superset of Slack.
The calendar integration is nice and the video chats are good, but The Linux version of their client just stops pulling audio all the time unless I do a `killall -9 pulseaudio` and restart it (and it's the only app left where I still have to do that).
Teams gets a big "Meh" for me on calls and awful for text chat.
Yes, it's odd. For those who haven't used Teams, it defaults to showing you a team's channels you use most frequently (I guess? I never quite understood the logic) and then you have to click to see the full list. Maddening.
As a result, I ignore them all.
They need some sort of “feed” feature.
Unfortunately your killall workaround does not work for me. I have to restart my laptop every time I have a Teams meeting -.-
I'm quite a happy user of Teams, the only thing I'm missing is ability to share my desktop with giving control to a remote caller - but I only needed that maybe once or twice over this entire year so far.
Note that outside of audio being disabled on a regular basis (and there being no way of setting it back up properly), I am also happy with the product. It beats Skype Business, which I could never get to work on Linux.
But then I got a member of a different Team, for one of our customers, as part of some integration work. And boy is that a CF.
Unlike Discord you either have this team or that team active. Notifications from the other are horribly unreliable, and there's no way to chat with someone in one team while you're in a call with someone from the other team besides running a separate client.
So as such, "Teams" really should have been named "Team".
AirSend gives you a few simple (chat, voice/video, files, tasks and wiki) but powerful tools and then get out of the way.
This was largely fixed, you may have to enable the "new meeting experience" though, which starts your meeting / call in a separate window from the main client
Last tried this a couple of days ago.
I see now that what I've always thought of as "channels" is called Teams, no idea how I've overlooked that for over two years but there you go.
My point is in Discord I can be on a dozen different servers with different administrators and seamlessly go between them. Not so in Teams. I'm stuck to one tenant (team) at a time. Which sucks if you need to switch between them.
You are correct that Teams today does not support Multi-Tenancy but that is really not an issue for 99.5% of organizations who would only ever have 1 tenant anyway
Teams is structure as
Tenant -> Teams -> Channels
Anyway, up until this became an issue, Teams has worked quite well. It does what we need when we need it, so can't complain really.
1. Many users have issues where the unmute button is unresponsive. Typically the workaround is to turn off incoming video feeds which isn't exactly ideal. This is a major turnoff.
2. Difficult to stay involved in multiple channels as described by another comment. I find it tedious to find what's happened if I've been away for a while.
3. Slack has bots that do various helpful things including leaving channels you don't use, asking you for your daily standup feedback if you don't have an in person meeting, referencing external content, etc. I assume Teams must have something similar but I've never seen them used which likely indicates its a lot easier to do with Slack.
4. Nicer UI as you allude to yourself
5. Slack works with several video chat options including their own (based on AWS tools I believe?) and Zoom. I actually prefer Slack video chat over Zoom or Teams for pair programming as its so easy to annotate the screen without clicking into a bunch of menus or being the meeting owner or something. You literally just start drawing on the screen and your coworkers see it
6. Excellent mobile app which is quite important for a chat client
7. Ability to run a small chatroom for free which AFAIK Microsoft doesn't offer (its included with other Microsoft products that were paid for usually)
8. Not tied in to only Microsoft products
Looks like there's a free [0] version of teams that supports unlimited search, unlimited app integrations and meetings of up to 100 attendees. Compare to free [1] slack that has limitations of 10k searchable messages, 10 app integrations and only 1-1 meetings
[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/microsoft-team... [1]: https://slack.com/intl/en-au/pricing
Good grief! Teams, suck!
The integration and embedding of office/powerbi/etc is neat, but it forces it into a Teams frame.
For some reason, some things launch SharePoint with its own bag of shit for trying to make its own version of web sites.
I’m in a big org with Teams for almost a year. We have thousands of employees who aren’t as active as hundred person free slack open source projects. People aren’t using it to communicate much with each other.
They keep emailing, or texting or IMing. I get more Skype IMs a day than Teams. And do you know how horrible Skype is?
Because of this, I think it sucks as a superset of Slack. Sure, it nominally has all those features, but in practice they aren’t usable.
I hope that MS just keeps iterating and it eventually gets better. I think it’s better now than a year ago.
The problem is that the people responsible for mandating its usage don't care how much it sucks, they care that it's working enterprise IM and they get it for free with the Office subs they're already paying for.
Apart from that, I find it clunky, unwieldy, and it has that unfortunate soullessness that permeates many 'productivity' applications (exemplified by the sterile selection of reaction emoji).
For me: Slack has character, and works well.
So while the collab works well, it’s a lot of work to then organize the files so anything beyond literal ephemeral scratch pads sucks for “power users” and completely confuses regular users.